Broken Country (Reese’s Book Club)

8. 1968

1968

Frank has left me a note telling me to come to the pub.

I put the kettle on to boil and make myself a cup of tea, but I don’t drink it. I’m listless and pacing, churned up with feelings I won’t allow to become thoughts. It’s the boy mostly. The grip of his hand. I’d forgotten how young children, much like animals, can sense your pain without being afraid of it. Frank and I dance around each other’s sadness. Any couple who has lost a child will tell you the same. You see it in the other, of course you do, but it’s like you’re on a seesaw of grief, and all you want is to avoid tipping the other one down.

Sometimes when I’m like this, I’ll give in to it. Sit still and think of Bobby, everything I miss about him, the boy he was. Other times, I get up—as I do now—find my coat, and head out. I need the distraction of others, the softening that only alcohol and conversation can bring.

The Compasses Inn, thatched, dark, and rickety, with uneven slate floors and shadowy corners, is where the village convenes of a Friday. There’s a knackered piano which is always in use at closing time, most often by the people who can neither sing nor play. The pub decor, if such a word can be applied, veers toward grim, with fearsome-looking farming equipment displayed on its walls: a rusting scythe from the eighteenth century, an antique plow, even a gamekeeper’s mantrap. The beer is regularly off, the crisps always run out, the floor is sticky with cider. There is no better place on earth.

Frank and Jimmy are sitting at the bar, half-drunk pints in front of them. I tap Frank from behind and he grins broadly as he turns to me, as if seeing me is the best thing ever. One time, after my sister, Eleanor, had overheard me talking to Frank on the phone, she said: “You don’t sound married when you talk to Frank. You sound like you’ve just met.”

I am lucky, I do know that.

Jimmy’s girlfriend, Nina, is behind the bar. They have been together since they were nineteen. She is a glorious-looking girl with her reddish-blond hair, back-combed tonight into an immaculate beehive. She loves to dress up. Nina and I often laugh about the so-called Swinging Sixties, how there’s no sign of it around here. Looking at the pub’s regulars—pipe-smoking men wearing corduroys, women in plain sweaters and slacks—you could be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped into a time warp. Not so Nina, who shops in London whenever she can, blowing her wages on the latest craze.

I love watching Nina at work. She coasts a perfect line between flirtation and censure. No one messes with her, not even the drunks. Although, to be fair, the drunk she manhandles from the pub most often is Jimmy.

“How was the boy?” Frank says, as soon as I am sitting beside him.

“He was very upset. Probably a bit shocked too, at his dog killing our lambs like that. He’s grown up in the city, hasn’t he?”

“And Wolfe? What was he like?”

I feel him watching me carefully. Frank picked up the pieces when Gabriel and I broke up. He knows, better than anyone, how long it took me to recover, how great the cost.

“He was nice,” I say, smiling at the blandness of the word. “Grown up, different. A dad, you know?”

“Once a posh nob, always a posh nob,” Jimmy says.

As far as I know, Jimmy has never met Gabriel before today, but he dislikes him regardless, out of loyalty to Frank. The bond between the brothers is fierce. When I read Of Mice and Men , I felt almost dizzy with recognition, as if Steinbeck had peered into my life. It’s insulting of me to compare them to George and Lennie. I’d never say it out loud. There’s nothing simple about Jimmy, yet he has an unerring, childlike devotion to Frank which sometimes feels too much. But mostly there’s a real sweetness to him. He can charm anyone from the church ladies to the local bobby; he’s a cap doffer and a door opener and usually the first to buy a round, even when he can’t afford it.

Helen is in the pub tonight; she has been my closest friend since school. When Bobby died, the whole village mourned for a week or two. Then they seemed to forget. Or perhaps, they didn’t want to remind Frank and me of our loss, aiming instead for breezy conversational chat that contained what was left unsaid like a layer of silt beneath. You could see the anxiety ticking across their faces. What can we talk about? I know, the weather! Helen was different. She came to our house every week, without fail, for the first year. She let herself in and washed up anything that needed to be washed up, cleaned the kitchen, changed the beds. She didn’t speak much; she just let us be while she worked in the background, cooking, tidying, making tea, quietly helping our lives to work better. I have never forgotten it.

Helen waits until Frank and Jimmy are talking. Then she says, in a low whisper: “Gabriel’s back? What the hell?”

“And we managed to kill his dog on his first afternoon.”

We burst out into the kind of laughter reserved only for the most inappropriate of moments, just as we did at school.

“Share the joke?” Frank says, turning around.

“Nothing interesting,” Helen says, smoothly. “Did I tell you our spaniel got herself knocked up? One-night stand with a Lab by the looks of things, the minx. Six puppies in all. We’ve one left to find a home for. A boy, very handsome.”

“I’ll take him,” I say, and Frank laughs in surprise, kisses the side of my face.

“Consultation is not something my wife chooses to engage in,” he says. “Why not? Be nice to have a pup on the farm.”

But already an idea is forming. I know full well the healing charms of a puppy. And there is someone who needs that even more than me.